Reaching
by Starlit Skyline
Summary: The Sun reaches for the Moon, even as he disappears into the night.


**AN: Though this has been done a million times over, I just could help myself.**

_And the Sun reaches for the Moon, even as he disappears into the night._

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><p>Reaching<p>

There is a hand reaching towards him, stretched across the barren space that yet keeps them apart. Their fingers brush, the touch so barely there it might not have been, and then one of the hands disappears never to be held or to hold another's.

The second hand – still there, still reaching though there is nothing to grasp – doesn't retract. It is still there, still offering something that can no longer be taken. It does not seem to realize the other is gone.

The owner of that hand stumbles forward, dazedly, as though drunk or just awoken from a dream. Fingers flex and search the air for something solid, something familiar. There is nothing, nothing but ash.

Her small feet leave footsteps in the white sand beneath her, on the ashes and forgotten nothings she walks on. Her white dress, shredded but still mostly whole, shifts and flutters with her uneven steps. She does not know where she is going. She does not know where he has gone.

Above all else, she doesn't know why she wishes that he had stayed – or at least that she had followed. She does not know why those desires linger in her heart, born and growing only now that the one they wish for is out of their reach. She doesn't know why his departure makes her feel so hallow, as if he had taken a part of her with him.

As if he had held her heart in the palm of his hand – and she, the one who had willingly given it to him – had held it close to the hole in his chest, had taken it for his own and left her to be the empty and unfeeling one.

She thinks she can feel wetness on her cheeks, but she feels as though her entire soul is submerged in the dark, murky waters of despair. She's not quite drowning and still able to draw breath – though it stings her lungs like tiny, numbing needles that somehow still managed to pierce her through the emptiness that is slowly overwhelming her.

She could neither reach the surface nor fall to the bottom. There are no hands to pull her up and no eyes to watch her as she falls apart.

There is no point in crying when the one she sheds tears for cannot see them, cannot wipe them away with cold, calloused hands and call her foolish and unreasonable. There is no one to be cruel by being kind, nor is there anyone to be kind by being cruel.

There is only her, her friend and her first love, standing in the middle of the desert as if they themselves were part of it. Just meaningless little things in the sea of forgotten nothings and white ashes. Insignificant little grains of ash and faded sand that bore no difference from any other. She wonders how long it wound take for them to disappear as well.

She wonders also, if all monsters wear mask and how could she be afraid of her first love more than she had ever been – ever would be – of her captor? Former captor. She's free now, wasn't she? If it's so, freedom had a bitter taste. But no, she isn't truly free – some part of her would forever stay in Houeco Mundo, buried and lost among its white sands and black, tainted skies.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and perhaps that is the only thing he ever was. Ashes disguised as flesh, porcelain for skin, wisps of pitch black for hair and green marbles for eyes. Nothing but a doll – the doll of Sousuke Aizen with painted tear-tracks and dry eyes.

He had never been anywhere to be found, never anywhere to be touched or held by anything other than Aizen's taunt strings. What other purpose could he have serve? What else could have driven him, besides his duty? What had he been about to offer her, this being made of ashes and oblivion, as it faded from existence, with that one hand reaching for hers?

What had she been left with, when he turned to nothing but a speck of dust in the vast desert?

He was nowhere yet he is everywhere around her. He was part of the forgotten nothings that made this desert what it was – a graveyard for those who could not find their way out of it's endless soil – yet he is in her heart and she will keep him there, alive, until the end of forever.

He is everywhere around her yet out of her reach. He is like the sand – he _i__s _the sand, slipping through her fingers easily, effortlessly, irrevocably.

It does not matter then, if she cries or not. He isn't there to watch her. He isn't there to not care or perhaps realize that he does.

These tears are not for him, then, but for _her_.

She cries because she was not able to save him. She cries because she had not been stronger, had not been able to reach him sooner.

She cries because, maybe, those green eyes of his had shone with a glimmer of hope, a shadow of a strange kind of content that could never truly hope to fulfill his being.

She cries because, had she been able to grasp that hand, perhaps she could have made sense of him, of his riddles and cryptic silences.

Perhaps, Orihime thinks, she could have loved him.

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><p><strong>Leave me a <em>review<em> and tell me what you think!**


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